Emergency medical technicians, first responders and paramedics—the backbone of emergency medical services—have worked for decades under a reimbursement system that effectively keeps their pay low and gives them an incentive to not always provide efficient, quality care.
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A bipartisan group of six lawmakers from the Senate Finance Committee issued an open letter to healthcare providers, payers and patients seeking input on better ways to prevent waste and fraud in healthcare, including ideas on improving the current audit system for alleged overpayments.
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Senate Finance Committee members plan to issue an open letter to U.S. healthcare providers to broadly solicit advice on the best ways to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in federal healthcare programs.
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A number of problems exist with the Veterans Health Administration's tracking and providing of mental-health services, a new report from the inspector general's office of the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department finds.
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In the latest in a streak of high-volume security breaches of patient records across the country, the South Carolina Health and Human Services Department announced that the records of 228,435 Medicaid beneficiaries were improperly transferred to an employee's e-mail account.
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Electronic health information exchange is ready to take off. Even so, a sizeable segment of the healthcare industry is likely to remain shortchanged.
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HHS officials are mulling whether to extend federal certification of electronic health records to long-term-care settings, as well as requiring public price lists for EHRs.
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Two CMS anti-fraud programs, whose Jan. 1 launch was scrubbed because of provider concerns, will start in June instead, according to the agency.
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Florida has one of the highest rates of erroneous Medicare claims in the nation, but the state’s Medicare administrative contractor is scaling back plans to conduct prepayment reviews of claims in historically problematic categories.
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The new Eagle Butte Health Center in South Dakota is set to open for business this week. The 10-bed, 138,000-square-foot Indian Health Service facility was paid for with $84.5 million from the stimulus law.
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